For many years we were alone. During childhood, our parents’ divorce and their careers meant many unsupervised hours where it was just the two of us. After launching our music career in our early twenties, we rarely had more than one additional adult along for stretches of weeks and months as we traveled around the world. Interacting with fans, local staff at venues, and program directors at college radio stations opened lines of communication that kept us tethered to the world around us. We’d always been curious and affable but these characteristics became skills, tools of survival. How do you turn an unruly, disinterested crowd into supporters? How do you convince a hotel manager in Los Angeles to let you into your room seven hours before check-in because in five hours you will be on an international flight to Japan? How do you navigate conflict with multiple polarizing personalities on a tour bus that sleeps 12 grown-ups, as it barrels down a freeway at 3 AM? How do you create a meaningful connection to yourself, your friends, family, and your spouse, when you are the central artery forever pumping blood to your dreams?
Was any of this life possible for one of us to build on our own? I don’t think so.
Tegan,
As I toured the High School production office, being introduced to accountants and coordinators, I felt a pang of disappointment that you weren’t there. We struggle with vulnerability, which is a significant driver of excitement. Admitting I am happy offers the opportunity for you to make me feel the opposite. So, I don’t know if we would have locked eyes and grinned at one another in our shared office when the door was finally closed. (I think it’s a meeting room when we’re not around) But standing there by myself, I felt overwhelming gratitude, and a Matrix-y is this real kind of excitement boiled over. I wasn’t nervous anymore; I belonged here.
I’d read on the production schedule that the team was location scouting at our high school and childhood home. I had to get a covid test to ride along and before lunch we were on the Deerfoot, heading north-east, in a 15-passenger sprinter van to the house where we’d lived from 1993-1996. (“The blue house” is how we differentiate it from the many others we lived in. Between our parents, we moved close to 21 times before we’d turned 18.)
The blue house plays an outsized role in our memoir. It was where we’d sneak from my bedroom window out onto the garage and into the night. It was where, on acid, I’d listened to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness for the first time. It was the bedroom where I’d fallen in love with K. It was in your room where we’d learned of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, and where we’d hosted grieving family after a funeral for our step grandfather that same weekend. Mom had graduated from the University of Calgary there and we’d transformed from soft teenage babies into scowling, swearing, lying brats.
I was delighted to report to the production designer responsible for creating the sets for the TV show that not much had changed over the two and a half decades since we’d sold the house. It has been owned and well-loved by the same family for 26 years. They have made it their own, but of course, my eyes, and heart sought out the similarities. There was the same rich blue paint color on the walls, and blue carpet throughout. And the deep walnut stain of the hardwood floors in the kitchen that our step-dad Bruce loved and Mom had hated. Upstairs, the teal blinds in our bedrooms were still capped with Mom’s home-sewn valances that matched our bedspreads.
There was also so much about the house that was different. A lanky black cat sleeping on the unmade bed in my old room made me think of Taya, our long-dead Siamese who used to sleep curled in the crook of my arm. The skinny trees and shrubs Mom planted out front the summer we moved in now block the living room window from the street. I’m trying to recall now if our old basketball hoop was still there, on the edge of the parking pad, except that I know it wasn’t. Memories are hard to change.
I let the team wander, confident that professionals didn’t need me to point out the details that mattered. On occasion someone would ask, “Were these the same kitchen cupboards?” or “Were there always cat doors cut into the wall?” I’ve always had this fantasy, that if I returned to a place I once loved, lost memories would reanimate. Like summoning a ghost, trapped and haunting. Perhaps, on that day, the circumstances, weren’t ideal, as nothing surfaced.
The family has now accommodated our intrusion into their home twice. And I’m reminded while writing this that I need to send them flowers.
Our high school was where I felt most transported on this trip. It is remarkably unchanged, and of course, like most schools, smells the same as it did in 1995. Its scent is every school’s scent, the way every hospital and dentist’s office is marked with a familiar odor. Dirt, mud, bleach, and the smells of a building built a century ago. But also, nothing like those things. It’s maddening to search for the exact description because it is a smell so familiar that the smell itself is the way I’d describe it. Standing in the entrance of the school, inhaling deeply, I am 8 years old and watching the clock above the teacher’s desk; I am 13 and struggling to remember my locker code; and in my dreams, I am forever 15, stuck in a math class, unable to read the numbers on the chalkboard.
It feels inconceivable to imagine a television show about high school being filmed anywhere but in our actual high school. And that was the big news I couldn’t wait to tell you! It’s not officially a done deal, but it looks likely that we will have a small window of time to shoot at Crescent Heights during filming. Exteriors of the school of course, but, also a few interior locations as well. With a population of almost 2000 students, gaining access during the school year will be tricky, but, the team felt that it should be prioritized.
What does it mean then that I care little about filming in the blue house, and am entirely satisfied by the idea of a set built to replicate it? But the idea that our high school will play itself inspired tremendous emotion in me? I suppose one theory is that if you were to add up the number of hours we spent in school, it was our true home in adolescence. It certainly remains a place of unresolved trauma, both consciously and subconsciously. Or maybe it says something about how unattached I am to the dozens of houses and apartments where we lived growing up and how the idea of home has always meant the connection I feel when I’m with you, and Mom.
The production team explored the school for hours, and unlike the years that we were enrolled there, I grew anxious about time, hoping this wouldn’t be the last opportunity to walk the halls of our high school and remember.
Sara
Alive in Calgary (Part 2)